Neoliberalism and Online Teaching Did Not Kill Higher Education – Professors and Administrators Did

[From Content Asian Studies] It’s 2030. A new semester is beginning, and a new class of freshmen is heading off to universities around the world where most of their courses are. . . online, or flipped.

In the University of America, World History, a required course for fulfilling general education (“gen ed”) requirements, has enrolled 2,000 students. It consists of video lectures that have been recorded by one tenured professor, online quizzes that are graded by Canvas, and 40-minute weekly “discussion labs” that are run by teaching assistants (graduate students). The professor of the course spends most of his/her time engaged in research, but has not actually published anything in years.

In the University of [Name a location outside of the US], the entire core engineering curriculum is online. The university has a multi-million-dollar contract with Elite Engineering Solutions, a multi-national company that provides science and engineering curricula “taught by MIT and Harvard professors.” The local faculty members supervise lab work and oversee exams. Most of their time is spent working to fulfill their key performance indicator (KPI) of having to publish 4 articles a year in Scopus-indexed journals in order to improve the university’s QS and Times Higher Education rankings. For each article in a Scopus-tier-2 journal they get $5,000. For an article in a Scopus-tier-1 journal, they get $8,000. For every 1,000 citations they get in their Google Scholar Citations index they receive a bonus of $10K.

Students across the globe have complained about these online courses for years. Now in 2030, a new discourse is emerging. Employers are starting to complain about how ill-prepared university graduates are to join the workforce. A particular concern is their lack of social skills. Employers complain that new hires lack the ability to interact and work with other humans, be they co-workers, clients, or customers and that this is negatively affecting the bottom line.

The Chronicle of Higher Education and University World News continually publish essays by academics who criticize neoliberalism and the decline of state funding for the transition to online instruction, a change that they declare is destroying higher education.

But that’s only part of the picture. The part they don’t talk about is the role that they themselves played in enabling online teaching to become the norm. After all, they are the ones who agreed to transition to online teaching in the first place, because they felt they could benefit from it.

Over the past 7-8 years, I’ve spent a ton of time learning from online courses. In order to learn how to communicate effectively in the digital age, I’ve tried to learn how to use the Adobe suite of tools, as well as to learn about things like web design, data analytics, SEO, content marketing, UX design, QGIS, SketchUp, drawing, and digital painting. To do so, I have taken courses from Linda.com (now LinkedIn Learning), Udemy, Skillshare, Proko, Schoolism, and Domestika, as taking courses from these professional providers is way more efficient than trying to learn for free on YouTube.

One thing I noticed right away is that each company only has one or two big “Introduction to Photoshop” (or Illustrator, or InDesign, etc.) courses. And that makes sense because you really don’t need more than that. There are a core set of skills and techniques that people need to learn in order to use the software, and so if one or two people create a course that does that, then basically that’s all that is needed.

Good examples of this are the courses that teach how to use the various types of Adobe software that Daniel Scott has created. Let me explain.

Not too long ago, if you wanted to learn how to use something like Photoshop, you either 1) bought a book or 2) enrolled in a weekend or evening workshop taught by a local “Adobe Certified Instructor.” Such a workshop might cost anywhere from $150-$750, and could last anywhere from half a day, or an evening, to two days.

Then a few years ago, Dan, an Adobe Certified Instructor, created online courses that replicated what had up to that point taken place in those “live” workshops. And like I said, once one person did that, that’s really all people needed.

Let’s now look at the present. Because of the Covid-19 Pandemic, everyone is teaching online. A university administrator is looking over the course offerings, and s/he realizes something.

The introductory World History (or Political Science, or Religion, or Philosophy, etc.) survey has always been divided into multiple sections and taught by multiple professors/instructors with the help of teaching assistants (i.e., graduate students). This has been necessary because there are too many students enrolled to be able to put them all in one room.

But if the course is taught online. . . then the students don’t have to all be in one room.

And if the course is taught online. . . then you don’t need multiple professors/instructors to teach it.

All you need to do is to develop the course once, like Dan did, and your good to go. . . Bingo!!

So the administrator calls together Department Chairs and members of the Office of Instructional Support and dangles a sweet carrot before them – money! Lots of it!!

The university will provide lots of money for departments to develop online versions of their introductory courses. It’s not an ultimatum, but with some vague references to the possibility of certain painful cuts coming to the departments if the economic bottom line isn’t met, and by trying to gain sympathy by mentioning how reductions in state funding are really putting the university between a rock and a hard place, the administrator makes it clear that the online direction is the way to go.

The Department Chairs go back to their departments and consult with the professors who teach the introductory courses. They do not include the adjunct instructors who also teach these courses, only the tenured professors. You have to follow seniority.

Yes, the adjunct instructors are more numerous, and yes they also have PhDs, and yes the teaching reviews for the adjunct instructors are consistently far better than those that the tenured professors get, but none of that matters. You have to follow seniority.

In the History Department, there are only two tenured professors who teach the introductory World History surveys. The Chair suggests that one create an online version of the first half of the survey and the other create an online version of the second half.

In encouraging these professors to do this, the Chair says, “It will be easy. All you have to do is to record each of your lectures once, and then you won’t have to teach anymore. The teaching assistants will do everything. You can spend all that time doing research.”

The two tenured professors feel a brief pang of guilt knowing that the adjunct instructors will lose their jobs, but then the joyous realization that they won’t have to teach anymore washes that annoying sense of regret far far away, and they quickly learn to rationalize to themselves what a good idea this change is.

“It’s great training for graduate students to learn how to run an online course!” “Yes, I really think that this will give them an edge when they go on the job market!!” (Of course, there are no jobs, but that’s another matter…)

So they launch the course, and the student feedback is almost universally negative, but the two tenured professors take that right in stride. After all, they have been receiving bad course reviews for years.

They just condescendingly brush it off by saying to each other, “Ugh! Students! You can never trust what they say in course evaluations.”

“I agree! They were probably just in a bad mood that day because they didn’t do well on the last exam. But that’s their fault! They should have studied. We made all of the information available for them right there online in our lectures, and if you look at the analytics you can see that most of them never even logged on to the course portal!”

Then fast forward to 2030. With the emergence of a new discourse coming from industry that points to the failings of online education, our two tenured professors pen opinion pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Education and University World News in which they attack neoliberalism and reduced state funding for all of the current ills afflicting universities, and conclude with a demand for more resources.

“We need more money!”, they state unequivocally, to the cheers, or “like” clicks, of their colleagues around the globe who take a break from online teaching and writing Scopus-indexed journal articles to read their essays.

Long forgotten will be the fact that these professors themselves willingly agreed to teach online because they saw it as a way to “not have to teach,” and the fact that concerns for the quality of the education that the students would receive online were never seriously addressed. Indeed, they never even came up for discussion.

My thinking on this topic has been inspired by a talk that Alan Soon gave on media transformation in Asia. Alan Soon is Co-Founder & CEO at Splice Media, an organization that seeks “to drive radical change by supporting bold, forward-looking media startups in Asia.”

In his talk, Soon points out that people hold deeply held beliefs about the supposed uniqueness and importance of the media, what he calls “Media’s sacred cows.” Believing in these “sacred cows,” and thereby believing in the infallibility of the media industry, people then blame the decline in traditional media on outside forces, like FaceBook and Google.

As Soon notes, in doing so people are misunderstanding cause and effect. “Facebook and Google didn’t kill news,” he argues. Instead, there is a long list of problems with the traditional media industry that killed the news, and Facebook and Google are effects of (or perhaps more accurately, responses to) those causes.

Soon points to examples from other industries where a single outside force is also blamed for an industry’s decline or transformation (Amazon did not kill bookstores; Uber did not kill taxis, Air BnB did not kill hotels, etc.).

An example that Soon does not point to is higher education, but as I listened to his talk, I kept thinking about universities, as universities also have their “sacred cows” that people uphold and repeatedly make references to (“History teaches critical thinking!”) as they ignore actual weaknesses in the educational enterprise (History does very little if anything to prepare students for communicating in the digital age.), all the while blaming outside forces, like neoliberalism, for everything they dislike.

Meanwhile, between higher education’s sacred cows and the actual problems with higher education is a convergence in the interests of many administrators and professors, a convergence that ensures that the actual problems and weaknesses in higher education do not get discussed or addressed, and a convergence that will ensure that more and more universities will turn to online instruction in the years ahead.

Administrators look for ways to cut costs, to rise in the rankings, and to “look good” as a university that is preparing its students for a 4.0 economy.

Many professors like not having to teach. Indeed, the “holy grail” of higher education is the job of a superstar professor who maybe teaches a graduate seminar once a year, but then spends the rest of the time conducting research, or carrying out grant projects with the assistance of a small army of graduate assistants, or traveling the world giving keynote presentations at conferences and university workshops.

As for everyone else, if you are at a research university, then much of the teaching (or at least the lower-level teaching) is done by graduate students, adjunct instructors and assistant professors, and the assistant professors work hard to get promoted out of that lowly status and role.

Meanwhile, professors at “teaching universities” who have 3-3 or 4-4 teaching loads also do their best to find ways to reduce their teaching through various course reduction policies (and for anyone teaching that intensely, that totally makes sense!).

So along comes online teaching. To administrators, this looks great. They can save costs by “teaching to scale,” and they can promote it as a bold effort to prepare students for the 4.0 economy (as if taking an online course or using Canvas somehow did this. . . but that’s another story).

Professors are wary at first, but then they realize. . .“Wait, I don’t need to teach?” “No, you just record yourself once and you’re done.” “Oh, well now that you put it that way. . .”

This is the convergence. And nowhere in this convergence are actual current problems with higher education identified, discussed, or addressed. More significantly, and this is where the real tragedy lies, what is important, and what works, for students are not identified, discussed or addressed either.

Instead, the university mobilizes the Office of Instructional Support to offer workshops to teach professors practical things like how they can get Canvas to grade their exams.

“What? I don’t have to correct exams either?”

Now professors are really starting to warm-up to this online thing.

Fasten your seatbelts everyone, and get ready for the ride, because higher education is goin’ online!

I said that I like the way that Alan Soon has deconstructed the common claims that people make about changes to industries. In particular, he has pointed out the fallacy of the logic that accuses some outside force for those changes rather than recognizing that the outside force succeeded because it addressed problems within the industry that the industry itself was not addressing.

This is what happened in the case of Daniel Scott as well. There were problems with those local Adobe workshops. First, they were expensive. Second, it’s difficult to retain three hours of information about something new.

Now Daniel’s three-hour courses on Udemy can be purchased for around $10 when they are on sale (which is often) as opposed to the $150-300 that a three-hour live workshop used to cost. And unlike the workshop, one can learn at one’s own pace and can keep going back to the courses for review.

So, in following Soon’s argument, Udemy didn’t kill local Adobe workshops. They died because they were expensive and they didn’t provide an optimal learning environment.

That said, Udemy courses definitely have their limitations, the biggest being the lack of human interactions and the opportunities to build human relations and networks. If you are self-motivated and able to figure a lot of things out on your own, then they can help boost your skills, for sure, but I can’t imagine how they can enable anyone to go from their bedroom to a boardroom, especially someone who needs to ask questions along the way.

Personally, in eight years I don’t think I’ve ever finished an online course. They are just too damn tedious. I keep going back and chipping away and learning little by little (and I totally enjoy that), but I can’t get through a course from beginning to end, even though it might only be two hours long.

Having said all of this, universities do not exactly fit Soon’s model. Online teaching is not some outside force that is successfully addressing problems within universities that universities themselves do not address.

Instead, it is something that is being promoted by universities themselves as a remedy to some problems that are perceived by university administrators. One problem is scale. In the digital age, it is difficult to justify having multiple people teaching the same course.

For other universities the “problem” is the desire to have their faculty publish more so that the university can rise in global rankings, and online teaching is seen as a way to reduce teaching time so that higher expectations can be made on research and publishing.

There are certainly many other scenarios and these are issues that do deserve to be addressed.

However, there is one major problem. Universities, and the professors and administrators who work there, are supposed to be educating students, but issues like these are not about students. They are about administrators and professors.

Unfortunately for students, it is these issues that professors and administrators care about that are leading the charge to teach online.

And while professors like to think of themselves as standing in righteous opposition to perpetually-misguided university administrators, professors have their own selfish interests, and in the case of online teaching, the interests of the two sides converge.

So prepare yourselves for 2030. When the pushback from industry against online teaching finally emerges, get ready to read opinion pieces by professors who will point to outside forces like neoliberalism as the culprit.

However, that’s not really going to be how it happened.

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